1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for fabricating a flash memory cell. More particularly, the present invention relates to a method for fabricating a SONOS flash memory cell and the structure thereof.
2. Description of Related Art
Flash memory can perform programming, erasing and reading many times and can retain information even when power is interrupted, so it is widely used in personal computers and electrical apparatus. The typical flash cell is an erasable programmable read-only memory with tunnel oxide (ETOX) cell. The ETOX cell is programmed by channel hot-electron (CHE) effects and is erased by Fowler-Nordheim (F-N) tunneling effects through the source side.
Moreover, the floating gate and the control gate of the ETOX cell are made of doped polysilicon. The electrons injected into the polysilicon floating gate are delocalized when the memory cell is programmed. However, if there are defects in the tunneling oxide under the polysilicon floating gate of the ETOX cell, current leakage of the device occurs easily, thus affecting the reliability of the device.
Therefore, in order to solve the problem of the gate induced drain leakage current of the ETOX memory cell, a flash memory cell with silicon-oxide/nitride/oxide-silicon (SONOS) structure has been provided. The SONOS flash memory cell comprises a charge trapping layer to replace the polysilicon floating gate. The charge trapping layer is comprised of silicon oxide/nitride/silicon oxide (ONO) layers. Since the charge trapping layer is a dielectric layer, the hot carriers injected into the charge trapping layer are localized and have a Gauss distribution. For this reason, the sensitivity of the memory cell toward the defects in the tunneling oxide layer is smaller and the phenomenon of the gate induced drain leakage current is reduced.